Welcome to Maria Hammarblad's home in Cyberspace. Sci-fi romance, contemporary romance, real life musings, and more.

Thursday, May 28, 2015

Mind-boggling sizes in space :-)

Space, the mere size of space boggles my mind, and it's one of those things that get more fascinating the more you think about it. I think about it a lot, thus I make my characters think about it too. ;-)
The Earth, our planet, is pretty big, right? Especially when compared to a human. Looking at the Earth and the other smaller planets around us, it has a decent size. Note how small Mars is.

If we just move a little in our own solar system, the Earth starts to look pretty small. Jupiter and Saturn are big. At least in this neck of the woods.

Jupiter is the 5th planet from the sun, and it is more than 11 times the size of the Earth. It has 317.8 times the mass of the Earth.

Funny enough, Jupiter still isn't all that big, at least not compared to our sun. The sun holds 99.86% of all the mass in our solar system. It would take 109 Earths stacked side by side to match the sun's diameter, and in order to fill it up, we'd need 1.3 million Earths.

So, it's settled? The sun at least is big?

It's a matter of perspective. Compared to you, or me, or the Earth, or even to Jupiter, the sun is huge. Compared to some other stars in our galaxy, it's pretty small.

The really scary thing is that not even Arcturus is a big star. Check this out:

Around here, my mind checks out. I can't really imagine something that big. And all these suns are still small compared to the galaxy, which is small compared to some other galaxies.

Here's our solar system. Fascinating!

I didn't make any of these graphics. Don't know where they originated, I've seen them in many places around the Internet, but I haven't found who originally created them.